I recently went to a Microsoft event in Reading called SLIDE7. We were informed of the event by a lecturer at the University. It is a Web development day put on by Microsoft, dedicated to students; Or at least I thought it was…
Upon arriving at the event, we passed mild-to-medium security, as each visitor had a unique badge to identify them, and to allow them access to the event. As I am an idiot, I signed up my Hotmail account over 5 years ago, so my badge said (with all appropriate Microsoft branding, of course ;P ) …
Andy Callaghan
Jib Corp.
The day began with a strongly Silverlight themed keynote speech by a senior education guy at MS. We were shown what could only be described as an advert for Silverlight, including skaters, young people, 'Web 3.0', nothing related to Silverlight whatsoever and lots of lovely swirling colours. Pretty!
What I couldn't stand was that at the beginning of the presentation, the speaker personally thanked the University of Hull for various things (I can't remember what now). This is the same University of Hull who have three of the five Software Engineering Imagine Cup invitationals, and stole the title this year away from fellow friends competing in the UK finals. It was so plain to see that some obvious dodging dealings had happened between Ms and Hull over money and Imagine Cup success in exchange for fresh young MS ready clones graduates.
A little birdie told me that the 'reason' why Hull 'win' the IC UK final so much is that their first year Computer Scientist's get taught C# in the first term. Not exactly from basics… At Reading, we got taught C and then C++ which is a lot more solid introduction to good programming skills. C# teaches jack.
Ehem.
My group of friends then decided to go with the beginner track rather than the advanced track, so we got ASP.NET and more interestingly a mis-titled talk called 'Mobile Web Development' after lunch, which was incidentally extremely nice and was effectively all-you-can-eat, as MS had order about two lunches per person at the event. Woot!
The mobile development talk however was presented by none other than Hull's very own Rob Miles. The lecture was good, but we were all a bit miffed to be taught in effect, by the enemy. Here a picture of the event that the lecturer took on the day of all the attendees in his talk…
I am the hairy on the 4th row from the front, 3 seats in from the right.
I think this is a good place to point out that in all the talks, something went wrong. Not saying that it's the speakers fault, as I know how hard it is to put on events, but it is sweet to see MS techies squirm as they claim that the application is failing as "it's only an beta version".
At the end of the day we received a surprisingly good lecture about Silverlight. MS plan to make Silverlight compatible with IE, Firefox and Safari on Windows and MacOSX.
At the end of the talk, my friend Ruben asked the speaker "Why are you providing Silverlight support in Linux?", at which point the speaker conveyed that there is simply not enough demand for Linux for it to be worth their while. Fair enough I guess, at least they acknowledged it's existence…
After the Silverlight talk we had a complementary BBQ, and then we all went to the pub and then back home. Good times!